We watched a TV Carnage tape at a going-away party tonight.
TV Carnage is a series of reliably funny and very cleverly edited compilations of incredibly bad television, but still, I've decided I'm against it in principle. It takes all the sport out of bad TV.
Ideally, bad TV is best when stumbled upon, when you have nothing else going on and you're flipping through your 9,000 (although even two is enough) channels and you come across some hideously grinning couple touting hair remover, or the Des Moines episode of COPS, or some insipid anchor awkwardly seguing from Israeli bombings to the annual local wiener dog races.
Bad TV is best when it's serendipitous and fleeting and you have to yell at your roommates to hurry up and come into the living room right this second so they won't miss some particularly appalling segment. Or when it's so bad you look at the person next to you in slack-jawed horror and murmur Good lord, why are we watching this shit, yet changing the channel is unthinkable. When bad TV is prepackaged, however ingeniously, to become the main event, it loses its thrill for me.
That said, in all my years of channel surfing, I've never just happened upon scenes of coprophagia (link is work safe but, like, icky) porn spliced in with 70s sitcom credits. So I have to give the TV Carnage people credit for that much.
Anyway. I spent last night at a going-away party too. My parents are in town and we all had lunch today, and tomorrow is going to be all about taking care of business, both of which are pretty remarkable, but the overriding theme of the weekend has been saying good-bye to brilliant girls who are leaving town to go to grad school.
You know, it's hard to be sad when people are going out and doing what they want, but I still get a little pouty when people leave: You mean you'd rather go off and learn about the mysteries and documentation of human existence than sit around drinking beer and making fun of shit with me? Really? You do?
Oh, sure, whatever. Yeah, I guess I can see that. Good luck, ladies.